Destiny was almost a modern day fantasy game, says Bungie

Destiny developer Bungie had a long hard think about where and when its online shooter was going to be set before it rested on a future sci-fi settings. The studio has explained that it could have been very different indeed.

Speaking with OXM, Bungie’s writer and design director Joseph Staten said, “We thought of a good handful of other genres as well. We’ve had a pretty long pre-production period and we explored everything from straight-up fantasy to something a little bit more modern to many, many other things as well.”

“Ultimately we gravitated towards this mix of science fiction and fantasy because it gave us this freedom. You saw small things like the prevalence of cloth in the game, a lot of characters have capes or cloaks and the combatants have cloth as well.

“Fantasy brings us this texture that we can wrap around sci-fi, which is really appealing, especially if you’re an artist who’s just been stuck making straight up space armour for ten years. A bit of cloth is very refreshing.”

It’s really strange to try and envision Destiny as some kind of fantasy-based Skyrim with guns RPG but then again that’s almost what Borderlands is.